It's mid-November here in Dallas, which means that the weather is cooling off, the shops are all blaring Christmas music, and (most importantly!) families and friends everywhere are preparing for a Thanksgiving feast!

Thanksgiving is a great opportunity for friends and family to get together and show appreciation for what they've got; however, an unprepared Thanksgiving can be fraught with chaotic commotion and panicked last-minute oven roasting.

Make sure that you're treating your business' local search engine optimization (SEO) strategy like it's a Thanksgiving feast: be prepared well in advance, let everyone know where (and when) it's going to be, and make sure each that everyone's got food to eat!

Ever noticed the little yellow figure that you can drag-and-drop in Street View on Google Maps? That little guy is named “Pegman,” and he’s about to become your local business’ best friend!

Inbound marketing(including content marketing and social media content) as well as SEO (search engine optimization) are surefire ways to get your local business on the map. One oft-overlooked element of a successful SEO strategy is the optimization of your business’ map listing data.

When consumers are looking for a new business, they use mapping products (e.g. Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.) 44% of the time! Additionally, on average, 41% of those map search results will result in an on-site visit. (Data from a Google study)

So what can you do to make sure that your business is being found (and is enticing to potential customers that find you via map search)? Read on to find out....

While it may not always be at the top of your to-do list, search engine optimization is a task that will need your attention from time to time to boost the success of your website. But what is the best way to go about doing SEO?

Even if you don’t manage your own search engine optimization efforts, a cursory knowledge of Schema.org markup code (and some best practices for feeding data to search engines) can help you to streamline your local SEO efforts or better communicate with your SEO provider.

I recently got married, and by recently I mean almost a year and a half ago. After some discussion with my husband and some personal contemplation, I decided to change my last name to be the same as my husband's.

Now, over a year later, I am still finding my maiden name in places it simply shouldn't be.

And this experience is often very similar to dealing with your business's local SEO presence. You submit your data to the top directories, and you still continue to find mistakes or areas that need improvement weeks, months, and possibly even years later.

This lead me to consider all the ways that changing your legal name and implementing local SEO are similar. And here's what I've come up with:

Local search is a powerful piece of your digital marketing strategy for your local business. More and more consumers are beginning their search for local products or services by searching online. And the stats show exactly why this is a smart move:

With the hold that the digital world has over the buying and selling process, even if you’re a brick and mortar business you can no longer ignore the need for local SEO. However, knowing how or where to start when optimizing your online marketing can be a bit difficult. Start with these foolproof digital marketing staples to boost your local search ratings today!

Finding ways to increase your marketing efforts past your local search optimization can seem impossible. The good news is, marketing has existed long before local SEO, so there are plenty of options out there for ways to gain some additional attention in your local market. By following these tips, bringing in more leads to your storefront will be a breeze.

Local optimization is an extremely important, but often overwhelming, aspect of search engine optimization. For multi-location businesses, keeping all data accurate and up-to-date can feel like a never ending process.

So how do you ensure that your data is accurate without spending your entire life scouring the internet for listings and updating them constantly? We've put together a few of the most important first steps for getting the ball rolling when it comes to your multi-family local optimization process.